Sex in Videogames, Part 1: Seduction

For the
last eight years, I've been employed by Electronic Arts in one capacity
and another, most recently as a lead game designer at Bullfrog Productions,
EA's UK subsidiary. But at the beginning of September, I cut loose at
last - became an independent design consultant, at least while I'm looking
for another job in the UK. So what's the first thing a newly-minted design
consultant does? Hies himself off to the nearest trade show and hands
his business card to all and sundry, that's what. In my case, this was
ECTS, the European Computer Trade Show, held annually in London in the
autumn.

Problem
was, when I got there, I couldn't get inside. There was a big crowd bunched
up just inside one of the doors. Eventually I slithered through and discovered
the source of the logjam. It was a booth for a company selling a product
called Erotica Island, and the booth staff seemed to consist primarily
of very fit, very tanned young women in bikinis. They were all having
their pictures taken by a large number of goofy-looking guys, with whom
I doubt they would ordinarily be seen dead if they weren't being paid
for it. One of the women handed me a flyer as I went past, but it wasn't
until just now, sorting through my mountain of trade-show junk, that I
turned it up again. The game, if it is a game, seems to be some sort of
strip/sex show featuring animated women drawn in the manga style. No men,
as far as I could tell. The flyer suggests it will be pretty explicit,
but I don't believe everything I read in trade-show flyers, either.

Erotica
Island is definitely not my cup of tea, but the incident got me thinking
about the larger issue. What about sex in computer games? Not just scantily-clad
Amazons running around with guns, but real sex. Should we or shouldn't
we - and if we should, how?

Well, to
start with, it's obviously not a great idea politically. Most of the game-playing
countries in the world have outright censorship in place even if, oddly
enough, their populations are generally less uptight about sex than America's.
The United States, on the other hand, has the fabulous First Amendment,
which is supposed to prevent censorship… and a very vocal, active
group of people who are doing their best to make sure that we, the interactive
entertainment community, are not covered by it. At the last Game Developers'
Conference, Doug Lowenstein, the head of the Interactive Digital Software
Association, said something really scary: three Supreme Court justices
are due to retire during the next administration. I don't know how he
knows this, but Lowenstein is paid to be politically connected and I'll
take his word for it. That means that whoever we elect this November is
going to have a profound effect on the way the First Amendment is interpreted
for years to come.

Erotica
Island is definitely not my cup of tea

Of course,
with the candidates we've got, we're really between a rock and a hard
place. On the one hand, there's George W. Bush, a Republican. For Republicans,
there's no safer political bet than cracking down on corrupt pornographic
filth. The GOP is starting to realize that there's more than one opinion
about guns, abortion, gays, and affirmative action, but nobody stands
up for porn. On the other hand, we've got Al Gore, the husband of Tipper,
the woman who took on the music industry over the issue of potty-mouthed
rap musicians and won, sort of; and Senator Joseph Lieberman, the game
industry's bête noir. Lieberman's not the monster he's often portrayed
as by infuriated gamers, but I don't think we can count on Al and Joe
for any support, nor to appoint any First Amendment stalwarts to the bench.
Whichever way we vote, we probably lose.

Now throw
in the recent Federal Trade Commission finding that, just as the tobacco
industry pretended its products weren't intended for kids and then aggressively
marketed to them anyway, a number of game publishers' documents show that
they have been deliberately targeting their M-rated games at kids. I'd
say that pretty well describes corporate hypocrisy in a nutshell, and
so we've just given ourselves another black eye. The bottom line is that
the political situation is looking pretty grim for us game developers,
and now is not the best time in the world to be turning out sexually explicit
video games.

However,
there's bound to be somebody or other who will do it anyway for the sake
of a quick buck, and there's not a thing in the world we can do about
it. So let's set aside the political question and look at it from a design
standpoint. How would one tastefully incorporate sex into a computer game?
Very few games actually have sex in them - the industry is much, much
more circumspect about sex than they are about violence, at least in America.
Planescape: Torment had sex in it, but it was purely optional.
It took place off-screen and it consisted only of sordid transactions
with prostitutes. Besides, the game made sarcastic remarks about you when
you did it.

Planescape:
Torment had
sex in it, but it was purely optional.

It seems
to me that there are three ways that sex can be made a meaningful part
of a game: seduction, sexual activity, and dramatic significance. I'll
look at each of them in turn. I should add a disclaimer here that I know
almost nothing of gay sexual mores, and I'm only going to talk about heterosexuals
from here on.

Seduction

Seduction is one of the great human games. It's the subject of countless
legends and works of fiction and is intertwined with all kinds of other
political, social, and religious thought, especially in the west. Eve's
act of offering the apple to Adam was seen by medieval theologians as
the original act of seduction and proof of the innately corrupt nature
of all women. (They came up with a clever dodge to excuse the Virgin Mary
from this charming generalization.)

Men who
play the seduction game with flair and success are called "womanizers,"
and they are publicly disapproved of while being privately envied and
admired, at least by other men. Women who play the game with flair and
success are called "sluts," and they are disapproved of even
more, though not without a certain wistfulness on the part of men who
would secretly like to meet them. Because seduction, especially by men,
often involves some kind of misrepresentation, it's seen as sleazy and
distasteful.

I know of
two games that have been about seduction - sort of. One was the wildly
popular Leisure Suit Larry series, which actually took that sleaze
and made it part of the game, with humor and good cheer. Larry was a loser
on the make and we all knew it. No one could possibly take the games seriously;
they were obviously a joke, and barely even an R-rated joke at that. Light-hearted
and silly, they were quite popular with women in spite of their subject
matter, which suggests how inoffensive they were.

The other game I know of was a completely odious little title called Man
Enough. It was rejected by Electronic Arts, though I believe that
someone picked it up. In Man Enough, you (a man, of course) were
trying to convince one of three women to sleep with you by choosing the
right conversational gambits. This was done by selecting one of three
lines to use in the usual RPG/adventure game fashion, and then observing
the woman's response to help you choose the next line, and so on. It wasn't
a text game, though; in addition to her reply there was a photograph of
the woman showing her reaction - smiling, puzzled, angry, etc. The production
values were terrible. This romantic fantasy seemed to be taking place
in a tackily-furnished suburban home, and the women were often too close
to the flashgun, which caused white spots in the pictures.

The worst
thing about the game, though, was the dialog - the lines they gave you
to say. You didn't sound like a suave and attractive seducer; you sounded,
as one review put it, like a ham-fisted drunk trying pinch the hostess
at a cocktail party. I suspect whoever wrote it didn't actually date much
himself. And just to top it off, there were weird mini-games built into
the storyline. One of the women wouldn't respect you unless you were able
to beat her at - get this - paintball. Well, I suppose it must be someone's
notion of foreplay. The game was non-explicit, incidentally; you went
to all that effort to seduce someone via paintball and the game modestly
closed the curtains when you finally succeeded.

As I see it, there are various difficulties with seduction in computer
games. The first is the sleaze factor. If seducing someone is made a goal,
a victory condition of a game, then it necessarily means that the player
has to try a variety of approaches before he succeeds. He can't be himself,
he has to be what the game wants him to be; to lie, or at least misrepresent
himself as something he's not - in short, a sleaze. I suppose it could
be used to teach adolescents good manners while on a date ("Oops!
You talked about yourself all night - no phone number for you!")
but that's not very interesting. One possible workaround is to design
it in such a way that, like a good dungeon master, the game rewards role-playing
in character. The seduction only succeeds if the player chooses actions
or words which are in keeping with his avatar's character.

Real seduction, though, involves a thousand subtle variables that - for
the moment - we can't begin to simulate. A coy smile or a roguish twinkle
at just the right time are far beyond the capabilities of any computer
game - heck, they're beyond the capabilities of a lot of flesh-and-blood
actors. Seduction in a computer game would have to be based only on conversation
and larger-scale, less subtle actions, and therefore it isn't really going
to seem like seduction, more like just another puzzle to solve.

And that, of course, is the biggest problem of all: it's necessarily mechanistic.
At worst, it could give people the erroneous impression than obtaining
sex is just a matter of being manipulative enough; that one can interact
with a man or woman as with a piece of software. In any case, it certainly
has nothing to do with real sex. Sexual chemistry is not a matter of clicking
on the right menu item. Think of Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in
To Have and Have Not, or Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep in The
French Lieutenant's Woman.. There's nothing mechanical at all in those
smoldering scenes. They're about pure desire, emotion unfettered by logic.
That's what makes them magic. Superimpose a mouse cursor over them and
the magic goes away.

You
know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together
- and blow.

Seduction can be incorporated into computer games, but only in a coarse,
clockwork sort of fashion. I have two suggestions about this. First, if
you want a seduction scene, make a non-interactive scene. That way you
can give it real sexual power without diluting it with clicks and icons.
Second, if you simply have to include an interactive seduction, make it
optional, not a required part of the plot. That takes away some of the
goal-orientation, which reduces the sleaze factor a bit. If it happens,
it happens, but it doesn't have to happen.

Attention friends and fans: as I mentioned above, I'm no longer
working for Electronic Arts, but now an independent design consultant.
That means that 1) after all these years, I'm finally free to talk about
EA and its products, which I will start to do in future columns, and 2)
I'm on the lookout for work. If you have any design
work to be done, large or small, give me a call. Also, if you have a design
and would like a critique, I would be happy to help - for a fee, of course.
Send E-mail to ewa@earthling.net
if you're interested.